My wife was preparing a tutorial / seminar on anxiety yesterday (she's a GP) and drew my attention to the Guidelines in Practice from NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) on general anxiety disorders issued in September 2011.

Now I summarise just a little (but not much) when I say that they suggest that to screen for a general anxiety disorder you have to ask a patient:

Over the last two weeks how often have you been bothered by the following problems:

- feeling nervous anxious or on edge?

- not being able to stop or control worrying?

NICE says that if you do one of these two things on more than half of all days in a fortnight days you may well have a general anxiety disorder.

Which by my reckoning means that right now any person with the slightest interest in the economy should have a general anxiety disorder - and a pretty massive one at that.

So have we at last defined Catch 22? Those without anxiety about the economy aren't sane and therefore can't be trusted and those with anxiety need treatment? Is that what NICE are saying?

The one thing I would suggest is don't ask your doctor - Lansley's got all of them just on the edge right now......

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In my case, however, I put it down to having a job that consists of daily trying to understand and advise on the tax aspects of transactions taking place within the scope of the world’s most complex tax system in the UK and not screwing up. And I don’t mean dreaming up artificial avoidance schemes.

Anxiety isn’t the half of it, so I keep commenting on sites like these in hope of someone listening, in hope that I have some kind of future, but each week it is becoming rather less hopeful. I apologise in advance for the length of my comment.

Myself and all of my neighbours who live in social housing soon realised that welfare reform would meant that we would lose our homes. I am also keenly aware of the economic disaster we are facing, having always followed and been interested in the financial news.

We are not ‘scroungers’: one of my neighbours is a pensioner who has worked all of his life; my other neighbour worked most of her life, but has a profoundly disabled adult son, and when her partner left her she had to look after him full time so she cannot work; my carers live in social housing and have worked all of their lives; I am chronically disabled and worked professionally up until 2 years ago.

All of us claim either full or partial housing benefit. Due to the changes in up-rating benefits and pensions, which will now lose 70% of their value over a 10 year period, alongside exponential rises in social housing rents that will reach 80% of private rental rates, our rents will soon become unaffordable, perhaps within 5 years. Even people who earn minimum wage and pay full rent will be priced out of their homes a few years after the government implement the changes.

Most of us have nowhere else to go. Our rents are currently among the lowest in the country because we live in an area (Stoke-on-Trent) that has some of the lowest wage levels in the country. Private lets are too expensive and the Local Housing Allowance bears no resemblance to them. Moreover, Local Housing Allowance will also not rise in relation to inflation so this benefit will also devalue year on year.

Most of us have no family with whom we can move into. Those of us who have family cannot expect them to keep us; they would not be able to afford to do so as our benefits may stop altogether if we move in with them, and any benefits we are allowed to keep will reduce in value until they are worthless, so we would have nothing to contribute.

To add insult to injury this weekend, Cameron announced that he is expanding the ‘right to buy’ programme. We already knew that the only middle income earners would be able to afford our homes once the rents rise, but to then think that they will be offered massive discounts in order to buy them is devastating. ‘Housing crisis’ sorted then.

There are 8 million social housing tenants, over 5 million of whom claim full or partial housing benefit. Consequently, no properties will be affordable for the 5 million claimants, and unless the remaining 3 million earn average wage they too will not afford social housing rents.

The anxiety about where we are all supposed to go is overwhelming at times. When the local authority owned our homes there was little money available for improvements. Most of us only had a sink unit in our kitchens when we moved in over 25 years ago, and hardly anyone had central heating, so we had to improve the properties ourselves by installing kitchens, central heating, paying for plasterers and electricians, often even paying for our own repairs because the standard to council repairs was so bad. We could never afford to buy, but we were forced to spend money on the properties and we did so in the knowledge that we had secure tenancies, so as long as we paid rent, the local authority could not take our properties from us.

There will be no redress in the matter. Today I learned that the government plan to suspend article 8 of the human rights act with regard to the ‘right to family life’ claiming that it will help them deport foreign criminals and terrorists.. Article 8 is also connected with housing, so if it is suspended, it will remove our rights as secure tenants and make it far easier to evict us. And, legal aid is to be scrapped for benefit or housing issues, so we cannot use that route to fight this.

We cannot afford to start all over elsewhere, and there is no ‘elsewhere’ to go to in any case. The hostels around the country are already turning thousands of homeless people away each year. The only option then is for us is to sleep rough, but I wouldn’t survive one week in winter. We just don’t know where we are going to go and no minister seems to have the answer to that apart from ‘boats’. One council wanted to build a caravan site for social tenants, but that was refused. It seems that in the government’s estimation we are viewed socially as below travelers; we truly are at the very bottom of the pile.

If these changes are allowed to go ahead we will have a humanitarian crisis on our own door step, which is an absolute disgrace in a western civilised country, but it is already happening in the US, so we shouldn’t be surprised.. Life was hard enough even with a roof above my head, and if I was able to keep my home, the cuts in benefits and the current financial turmoil will mean that I won’t be able to afford to run it in any case: anxiety isn’t the half of it as I said.